WBCSD Business Ecosystems Training at the IUCN Business Week!

IUCN Business Week is designed to inspire a fresh perspective on collaboration and engagement with the private sector and brings together over 40 IUCN staff from headquarters, regional offices, national committees and global thematic programs alongside over 25 external business participants arriving later in the week.

Geneva, 12 September 2013 - Sometimes the language divide between scientists and business seems huge. Indeed one of the IUCN Business Week’s key questions mischievously asks “what are the tips for working with the other side?”

Yesterday IUCN staff learnt about one way to share their part of the story.

The Business Ecosystems Training (BET), developed by WBCSD in conjunction with an advisory panel including IUCN, helps conservation experts train businesses on the links between ecosystems and business. The morning’s train-the-trainer workshop took IUCN staff through the training material and how to use it. The modules are designed to equip business with the skills it needs to better understand, measure, manage and mitigate ecosystem impacts and dependencies. They can be tailored to cover a wide range of audiences from broad sessions with a number of companies to training teams within one company.

Learning how to organize a BET session triggered IUCN staff to discuss awareness sessions that they were already doing with business and the possibility of adapting many of the IUCN tools to have a business focus with the aim of getting the IUCN value proposition on companies’ radar screens.

Daan Wensing of the IUCN Netherlands Committee has already used the training with Leaders for Nature, the IUCN Netherlands business network working together on greening the economy. “We have had some great feedback from the companies that we have trained using BET. It is also a great tool to get a first contact with organizations, as an example we used the first module at the 2012 World Conservation Congress in Jeju and will be using it next week at the CSR Asia summit in Bangkok.”